English Composition — Syllabus
English Composition is a 3-unit, lower-division undergraduate course offered at [Institution] in [Term]. The class meets in person twice a week for about 75 minutes each time: [Meeting days/times].
This syllabus is the governing document for the course. It tells you what the course is, how your grade is built, what happens each week, and the policies you can count on. Weeks are numbered from Week 1 to Week 16; your instructor's course site gives the due date for each item.
Instructor and Contact
- Instructor: [Instructor name]
- Contact: [Contact info]
- Office hours: [Office hours]
Bring a draft to office hours, even a rough one, along with the one sentence or paragraph you are least sure of, and reach out early: a question asked in the week it comes up is far easier to answer than one saved for the night before a paper is due. Check the course announcements at the start of each week.
Course Description
This is the first-semester writing course, required in some form at nearly every two- and four-year institution, and the one that pays off in every course and job after it. It treats writing as a process you can learn and a set of choices you make for a real reader. No prior college writing is assumed. First drafts are supposed to be rough; this course teaches you what to do next.
The course moves in a clear arc. It starts with the writing process and the rhetorical situation: who is reading, why, in what form, and why good writers revise instead of trying to get it right in one pass. It then turns to critical reading, the paragraph, and the thesis, and moves through the modes: narration and exposition, rhetorical analysis, and argument, with the midterm as a checkpoint in Week 8. The second half is about sources: finding and evaluating them, bringing them into your writing honestly, documenting them in MLA style, and building a research-based argument. The last weeks turn back to your own drafts with revision and style, editing, and a reflective portfolio that shows what you can now do.
Every craft move is shown on a real draft, before and after, and ends in one plain sentence naming what changed and why it serves the reader. You will analyze how real texts persuade, including verified fragments of speeches and essays from writers such as Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George Orwell, and you will analyze them for craft, never for agreement. Argument is taught as a skill you can practice on a position you do not hold: the topics are substantive, arguable, campus- and community-scale questions, and the course takes no side on any public question. Above all, the course holds you to one standard: every quotation, source, and citation you submit is real, exact, and checked against the original.
This is not a literature survey, a creative-writing course, or a grammar handbook. The editing week covers the handful of errors first-year writers make most often, and the research weeks build one research-based argument rather than a long research project.
Required Materials
You buy no textbook and pay nothing for course materials. Every reading and video is a link to an external resource, opened from the week's page so you always reach the version the course teaches from. Beyond a web browser, you need:
- A word processor: Google Docs (free) or Microsoft Word, for drafting, revising, and formatting your papers in MLA style.
- MLA style, used critically: the course teaches MLA style as set out in the MLA Handbook, 9th ed. (Modern Language Association, 2021). You do not need to buy it: the chapters model every rule the course uses, and the readings link free guides. A citation generator's or a chatbot's entry is a draft you check against the MLA template and the real source, never a finished citation.
- A free account with one approved AI chatbot, from the list in the AI-Use Policy below. A free tier is enough for everything in this course, and every AI-based activity also has a route that needs no AI at all.
- A folder for your drafts. Keep every draft and the ungraded diagnostic write from Week 1. The portfolio in Week 15 uses them to show how your writing changed.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this course you will be able to:
- Outcome A — Composition and argument. Compose clear, well-organized, thesis-driven, audience-aware prose in multiple modes, and develop and support an argument using appropriate rhetorical strategies while representing opposing views fairly.
- Outcome B — Source-based research and academic integrity. Locate, evaluate, integrate, and accurately document credible sources in MLA style, avoiding plagiarism and verifying every quotation, source, and citation against the real text.
The eight course objectives below build toward those two outcomes. Each week's Start Here page names the objective that week serves and turns it into a short checklist of what you should be able to do by the end of the week.
- Analyze the rhetorical situation — writer, audience, purpose, genre, and context — and approach writing as a recursive process of invention, drafting, revision, editing, and reflection, distinguishing revision (re-seeing ideas and structure) from editing (sentences and surface).
- Read critically: annotate a text, summarize it accurately and neutrally in your own words, respond to it analytically with reasons, and separate a writer's claim from its support and a summary from a response.
- Develop an arguable, specific thesis and organize an essay around it — unified, coherent, well-developed paragraphs built from a point through evidence to explanation, with an introduction that lands the thesis, transitions that name real relationships, and a conclusion that synthesizes.
- Compose in multiple rhetorical modes — narration and exposition, rhetorical analysis, and argument — using the appeals (ethos, pathos, logos, kairos) to explain how a real text persuades and the structure of argument (claim, grounds, warrant, counterargument, rebuttal) to build your own, arguing from evidence and representing opposing views fairly.
- Find, evaluate, and integrate credible sources: turn a topic into a research question, classify sources, judge credibility by lateral reading and a checklist, and quote, paraphrase, summarize, and synthesize with signal phrases and attribution — never patchwriting, never plagiarizing, and never trusting an unverified quotation, source, or citation.
- Document sources in MLA style — in-text citations in the author-page form and a works-cited list built on the ninth edition's template of core elements and containers — and apply MLA formatting conventions accurately, checking any generator's or chatbot's entry against the template and the real source.
- Revise globally and edit locally: re-see a draft's thesis, structure, argument, and evidence; then sharpen sentences for concision, variety, emphasis, and voice; and correct the most common surface errors — fragments, comma splices, fused sentences, agreement, pronoun reference, apostrophes, and commas.
- Reflect on writing as a process: assess your own choices with specific, evidence-based reflection, assemble and introduce a curated portfolio, and articulate which skills transfer beyond this course and where.
How this course works
Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so you can choose how to take it in. Each module's lecture page carries the week's explanation as one spoken-style walk-through as well.
A typical week runs in this order:
- Start Here. Open the week's module overview. It lists the week's items in order with time estimates and names the week's checkpoint, the one thing you should be able to do by the end of the week.
- Chapter (about 35 to 50 minutes). The week's primary reading, with every writing move shown on a draft. Read it first.
- Lecture page and slide deck (about 15 to 20 minutes for the lecture, plus time with the deck). The same ideas, explained aloud and in slides.
- Readings and videos. An optional go-deeper menu; every video has captions.
- Lecture tutorial (60 to 90 minutes). A one-on-one session with your chatbot that teaches, gives practice, and ends with a summary you submit.
- Practice set (about 20 minutes). Ungraded practice with a coach, at your own pace.
- Writing Studio (about 90 minutes). The week's craft done end to end: you draft or revise on the week's focus, review the draft against a short checklist and revise it, ask your chatbot for feedback without letting it rewrite your work, and then catch and correct a mistake the chatbot makes on a writing task.
- Discussion (about 45 minutes) and assignment (60 to 90 minutes, and more in the weeks that ask for a full essay). Where you put the week's ideas to work on a real question and on your own writing.
- Quiz. A short auto-graded check of what you now know, taken on your own.
Week 8 is lighter: the chapter, lecture, slides, readings, practice set, and discussion, then the study guide, exam-prep tutorial, practice exam, and midterm. Week 16 has no new module; it holds the final exam and its study guide, practice exam, and exam-prep tutorial.
Grading
Your course grade is the weighted average of the six groups below. The weights sum to 100%.
| Component | Weight |
|---|---|
| Tutorials & Practice | 10% |
| Quizzes | 10% |
| Workshops | 20% |
| Assignments | 25% |
| Discussions | 15% |
| Exams | 20% |
| Total | 100% |
What each group holds
- Tutorials & Practice: the 14 weekly lecture tutorials, 5 points each. The practice sets sit beside them and are ungraded.
- Quizzes: 14 weekly quizzes, 10 points each, in every module except Week 8.
- Workshops: the 14 weekly Writing Studios, 50 points each, in every module except Week 8.
- Assignments: 14 weekly assignments, 100 points each, in every module except Week 8. They include your first major essay in Week 5, your argument essay in Week 7, and your portfolio with its reflective cover letter in Week 15.
- Discussions: 15 weekly discussions, 10 points each, one in every module from Week 1 to Week 15.
- Exams: the midterm in Week 8 (50 points) and the cumulative final in Week 16 (100 points).
Each week's discussion and assignment ship in two versions. The adaptive version is published and graded by default. A traditional version that uses no AI is also in the module, unpublished; your instructor may publish it instead. An unpublished version does not appear to you and does not count. A published traditional version takes the adaptive one's place in the same group, for the same points.
Letter grades follow the standard scheme:
| Letter | Percentage range |
|---|---|
| A | 90–100 |
| B | 80–89 |
| C | 70–79 |
| D | 60–69 |
| F | below 60 |
Weekly Schedule
The course runs for sixteen weeks: fifteen weeks of modules and a finals week. Every module from Week 1 to Week 15 holds the same materials: the Start Here page, the chapter, the lecture page (titled "Lecture:" followed by the week's focus, such as "Lecture: The Writing Process & the Rhetorical Situation"), the slide deck, the readings and videos page, and the practice set. Every module also ships both an adaptive discussion and a traditional no-AI alternative, and every module except Week 8 ships both an adaptive assignment and a traditional no-AI alternative. The adaptive versions are graded and published; the traditional alternatives are unpublished by default and count only if your instructor publishes them instead.
| Week | Focus | Graded and published | Traditional alternative (unpublished) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Writing Process & the Rhetorical Situation | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 2 | Critical Reading: Summary & Response | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 3 | The Paragraph | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 4 | Thesis & Essay Structure | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 5 | Narrative & Expository Writing | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 6 | Rhetorical Analysis | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 7 | Argument: Claims, Evidence & Warrants | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 8 | Midterm Review & Exam | Discussion, midterm exam | Discussion |
| 9 | Research: Finding & Evaluating Sources | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 10 | Integrating Sources: Quoting, Paraphrasing & Avoiding Plagiarism | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 11 | MLA Documentation | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 12 | The Research-Based Argument | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 13 | Revision & Style | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 14 | Editing: Grammar, Mechanics & Common Errors | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 15 | Reflection & the Writing Portfolio | Tutorial, Writing Studio, discussion, assignment, quiz | Discussion, assignment |
| 16 | Finals week (no module) | Final exam | None |
The midterm in Week 8 covers Weeks 1 to 7, which is Objectives 1 to 4. The final in Week 16 is cumulative and draws on every course objective: the rhetorical situation and the writing process (Objective 1), critical reading (Objective 2), the paragraph, the thesis, and essay structure (Objective 3), the modes, rhetorical analysis, and argument (Objective 4), finding, evaluating, and integrating sources (Objective 5), MLA documentation (Objective 6), revision, style, and editing (Objective 7), and reflection and the portfolio (Objective 8). Both exams come with a study guide, a practice exam, and an exam-prep tutorial you work with your chatbot.
Attendance and Participation
This course meets in person twice a week. Come to class having opened the week's Start Here page and read the chapter, and bring your current draft, because class time builds on that reading with writing moves worked on real drafts, peer review, and questions. Your participation also shows in your weekly work: the tutorial, the Writing Studio, the discussion, the assignment, and the quiz. Writing builds week on week, so falling a week behind is the most common reason a grade slips; keep to the weekly rhythm and talk to your instructor the moment a draft stalls. If you must miss class, follow the week's module from its Start Here page so you stay on pace.
Late Work
Late work loses 10% of the item's points for each day it is late. If something serious comes up, such as an illness or a family emergency, contact your instructor before the due date whenever you can so the two of you can agree on a fair plan. The penalty exists to keep the course moving, not to punish genuine hardship.
Academic Integrity
The work you submit must be your own, and you are bound by your institution's academic integrity standard. Do not copy another student's work, do not submit work you did not do, and do not misrepresent how a piece of work was produced. In a writing course, integrity also means honest borrowing: put a source's exact words in quotation marks, put a paraphrase fully in your own words and sentence structure rather than patchwriting, and cite every idea you take from a source, as the course teaches in MLA style. Three violations matter most in this course: submitting a quotation, source, or citation you did not check against the real text, including one a chatbot supplied; fabricating or doctoring a chatbot conversation or its share link; and using AI on the quizzes, the midterm, or the final. Violations are handled under your institution's academic integrity process and may result in no credit for the item.
Accessibility and Disability
This course is designed to reflect universal-design principles and offers multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression. If you have a disability and need an accommodation, contact your institution's disability services office to arrange it, and let your instructor know so it can be put in place promptly. If any material is hard to use with your assistive technology, tell your instructor and an equivalent version will be provided. This course is not yet accessibility-certified, and your feedback helps improve it. The course page Accessibility & Inclusion in Module 0 explains how the course offers multiple modes, how to turn on captions, and how to request an accommodation.
AI-Use Policy
This course uses an AI chatbot as a writing coach, and then asks you to check its work against the real text. Use any one of the approved chatbots: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, or Microsoft Copilot. Your instructor may edit this list. Free tiers are fine, and Copilot is often included with a campus Microsoft 365 account.
AI may be used on these activities:
- Lecture tutorials (completed with a chatbot). Each week you work the tutorial in a conversation with an approved chatbot, then submit the conversation share link and your completion summary.
- Practice sets (ungraded). You work the practice exercises with a chatbot coach.
- Adaptive discussions (completed with a chatbot). You hold a real-time dialogue with an approved chatbot, then post the AI's summary with the conversation share link. This version does not require replies to classmates.
- Adaptive assignments (AI-coached). You draft and revise with a chatbot coach that scores your work against the assignment's rubric, then submit the self-scored report and the conversation share link. You remain the author: the coach asks questions and checks your reasoning; it does not write the paper.
- Writing Studios (a coaching step and a required AI-critique step). You ask your chatbot for targeted feedback on a paragraph without letting it rewrite it, and act on one piece of feedback in your own words. Then you ask it to improve, analyze, paraphrase, cite, or fix a passage, and catch and correct a mistake in its answer by hand, such as hollow praise that points to nothing, an over-edit that turns a plain sentence into boilerplate and erases the writer's voice, a quotation that was never said or is misworded, an invented source or citation, an MLA entry presented as correct when it is not, a "correction" that changes the meaning or adds an error, or summary passed off as analysis.
- Exam-prep tutorials and studying. Use AI freely to review, to check your understanding, and to prepare for the exams.
AI may not be used on the quizzes, the midterm, and the final. These are closed to AI and must be entirely your own work, because they confirm that you personally can read a text critically, build a paragraph and a thesis, name an appeal or a fallacy, and write a correct MLA citation.
The tool drafts; the writer judges. A chatbot can be a useful drafting partner and still be wrong about writing. It invents quotations and sources, praises without pointing to anything, flattens a voice into boilerplate, and "corrects" sentences that were already correct. Every quotation, source, and citation you submit must be verified against the real text, and your sentences stay your own.
If your instructor publishes a traditional alternative. A traditional discussion is your own post and your own replies to classmates; a traditional assignment is your own submitted work, graded by your instructor. AI may help you think, but you write and submit the work yourself.
Disclosure. The share link documents your AI use on the AI-based activities, so they need no separate note. For any other graded work where AI help is allowed, add one line naming the tool and how you used it.
Bring your own AI: access, cost, and privacy
- Equity and a non-AI route. You never have to create an account with a chatbot company to complete this course or to reach any grade in it. Every AI-based activity in this course carries an Equivalent route (no AI required) on its own page. It assesses the same objectives, for the same points, against the same rubric. Take it whenever you like, for any reason or none; you do not have to ask permission, explain, or arrange it in advance.
- Cost. A free tier of any approved chatbot covers everything in this course. No graded work depends on a paid subscription.
- Privacy. Before you start, read what your chosen chatbot keeps of your conversations and how it uses them. Never paste personal information you would not want stored, think before pasting a personal essay or a classmate's draft, and remember that a share link lets anyone who has it read that conversation.
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